Tag Archives: geekdad

The gaming industry, like the voiceover industry or the genre fiction industry is not very big, when you really get down to it. In fact, among creators, the overlap between "industry" and "community" makes almost a perfect circle. Everyone pretty much knows everyone else, and good news travels as quickly as bad.

Yesterday, one of the truly great people in the gaming industry, who I think we all believed had reached maximum character level, surprised us all and leveled up a little bit more:

If you know of Dork Tower, then you’re already squee-ing in excitement right alongside us. If you don’t know what Dork Tower is, then either you’re about to add a new layer of happiness to the Photoshop composite of your life, or you’re slowly beginning to realize you didn’t click through to the Monkey Bites blog.

Dork Tower has, in its decade of life, existed as a standalone comic book, a featured comic in Dragon, Scrye and Games magazines, and one of the earliest regular webcomics online. Its creator, John Kovalic, is also the illustrator and co-creator of world-renown games Munchkin and Apples to Apples. But perhaps his greatest creation is his new daughter, whose existence has transformed him from a simple, Bruce Banner–like comics and game illustrator, into a hulking green(bay) GeekDad. Which is where we come in.

This is kind of like my favorite indie television show getting picked up by a major network. It's such a perfect match, I can't believe nobody ever thought of it before. You know those people who are so delighted to be a parent, they sort of jingle and glow and levitate off the ground with joy when they talk about their kids? That's John. You know those guys who you know you can speak to in the most obscure geek dialect, secure in the knowledge that they'll grok you? That's John.

Congratulations to John and GeekDad, and to all their individual readers who are about to discover an awesome new level of the dungeon to explore.